*Inspired: TS Eliot’s The Wasteland

*April is the cruellest month, breeding
mosquitoes for the dusk of May,
yet it does not compare to the savagery
of the brutal month of February.

The marrow of our bones
frozen by the icy clutch
of winter’s raw contemptuousness
for all things living.

The arctic air ravages
the land itself until
the Earth is a frozen wasteland
where no water moves

and the wind chill is
thirty-three below,
but the temperature is a
moderate minus twelve

for days and days and days.